Goodbye Chomsky, and Other Essays on Language

Robert D. King

• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781645759553
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildungstheorie & -praxis

The idea of this book is that language is too interesting to be enjoyed exclusively by linguists.

This is undoubtedly unfair to linguists—not people who speak several languages but academic linguists ( for whom linguistics is the scientific study of language). Though this book is informed by linguistics, it is not a linguistics book, rather a language-not-linguistics book. It is a book about topics involving language that interest me and that I hope will be interesting to the intellectually curious reader.

Its topics include J.R.R. Tolkien ’ s languages of Middle-earth, invented and artificial languages, language and gender, dialects, American versus British (Noah Webster), the Whorf-Sapir Hypothesis, African-American v ernacular English, the history of English, English as the world ’ s language, language death, the rebirth of Hebrew in Israel, the Yiddish language, language in India, language and nationalism, DNA and the origins of language, the dilemma of the postcolonial writer, and more.

Chapter 1
Linguistics Lite

"No matter how eloquently a dog may bark,

he cannot tell you his parents were poor

but honest."

—Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), philosopher, mathematician, social critic.

F.A.Q.

Over the years, many couples, usually both immigrants or one an immigrant and the other an American, have come to me with a plaintive question: how can we get our children to continue to speak our native language and learn English well at the same time?

There is no simple solution to that dilemma, alas, but there is a big DO NOT I can offer. Do not pay attention to what your fathers and mothers, your grandfathers and grandmothers, well-meaning friends, strangers in the checkout line at the grocery store, aunts and uncles, and just about everybody else tell you. They may tell you must speak only English with the kids, otherwise they won’t learn it. Ignore them. It is not true. If the children are growing up in America, have American playmates, and going to an American school, they will learn English.

Suppose you are a French couple who has decided things might be better in the U.S.A. and so have come here to make it home. Before your children even start school or kindergarten, they will ordinarily be playing with American children. They will learn English from them, and far more easily and rapidly than you yourself would. When your children start school or kindergarten, the process will go still more swiftly. School is a tidying-up situation. They’re already speaking English, 90 times out of a 100, and what you’re doing at home isn’t going to affect them that much one way or the other.

The best thing you can do to get them up to an acceptable speed in French and stay there is for both of you, the parents, to speak only French to them. Or if one of the parents is French, then he or she should speak only French with the kids at home. If the other spouse speaks reasonably decent French, then he or she should join in too. Be nice about it. Make it into a game: ‘It’s our way of being different in our family, no big deal.’ What it should not be is the equivalent of root-canal surgery.

If you can get them enrolled in a mostly French-medium school or an afterschool French school, so much the better. They will still learn English. The more often and the earlier you can go back to France for visits the better, especially if the grandparents are warm, affectionate, funny, and fun for the kids to be around. If they aren’t that way, well, do the best you can.

The greatest of all things you can do to get your children to grow up with French and English and keep their French is, as early as possible, to get a warm, loving grandmother to come live with you and be the kids’ nanny as well as their grandmother. (A grandfather will do just as well.) It’s much better if the grandparent speaks not a word of English and doesn’t want to learn it. Almost guaranteed to work.

A graduate student of mine once investigated which families in Austin, Texas, from Mexico kept Spanish going the best. Does religion make a difference? No. Economic status? No. Educational attainments of the parents? No. The only scheme that worked just about 100% of the time was the loving monolingual grandmother or grandfather from Mexico.

What you have going for you is something linguists call the Critical-Age Hypothesis: it is relatively easy for children under the age of puberty to acquire languages. Children in such countries as Luxembourg, Sweden, and Holland routinely learn at least three languages these days, one of which is English. There have been children of diplomats who acquire even more. Learn early, keep at it, hide your inevitable disappointments! It won’t always be easy. Sometimes the children are so resistant and disputatious that nothing works. Tant pis, as the French say: so much the worse. They may regret it someday.

What is Linguistics?

Language is a part of just about everything we do—though linguistics isn’t. No matter how we spend our days, sort out our lives, try to get along with each other, or earn a living, one thing doesn’t change: language is a part of virtually everything we do. We argue, talk about the weather, plan trips, express emotions, try to get people to see things the way we see them—all by means of language.

Language is the medium we swim in, so to speak; like fish in water. It is difficult to imagine spending an entire day without speaking or being spoken to. It’s even harder nowadays with iPhones and texting and all the other electronic apparatus of modern life. There are religious orders where speaking is forbidden for much or all of the time.

Man is the only animal that talks. Animals communicate; they don’t talk. They send messages to each other; they don’t converse on a wide set of topics. This point is critically important to understanding what linguistics is and why linguistics—what we linguists call ‘the scientific study of language’—has become a central discipline on the turf of every major and not-so-major university and why it is a discipline that ties together the other humanities and social sciences.

We do not believe that animals ‘speak’ to each other in anything like the sense that we speak to each other when we say something as trivial as, “What would you like to eat tonight?” Animals do communicate, of course: dogs bark to warn of approaching dangers; bees go through an elaborate dance conveying the location of a food source relative to the hive; dolphins and chimpanzees, among other creatures, have a complex and intricate code that permits them to communicate, among much else, distress and interest in reproducing and food.

There have been many experiments trying to teach animals to talk. Chimpanzees have been raised with human beings as one of the family and taught to produce a small number of phrases (‘Please machine give Lana piece of apple’) using sign language or manipulation of plastic chips, but it now appears to be clear that chimps can’t go much beyond a relatively small set of words and rules. They learn to ‘say’ certain things (‘Give me a banana’) and make exciting progress at first, only to hit a plateau of a few hundred expressions maximum, and, beyond this barrier, they cannot go (apparently).

Animals can signal each other, and some species—birds and dolphins come to mind—have so immense an array of complex signals that it seems like they do, in fact, possess ‘language,’ but their messages are finite. Ours aren’t; we know for certain that there is no limit to what humans can say. We understand sentences we have never heard before, and we construct sentences we have never used before. We use nuance. And we don’t even notice that we’re doing it! It is so easy! Animals communicate, but they don’t possess language. Humans do.

Some years ago, I read a book, a book that made the bestseller lists for a while, by Dr. Irene M. Pepperberg entitled Alex and Me: How a Scientist and a Parrot Uncovered a Hidden World of Animal Communication—and Formed a Deep Bond in the Process (New York: Harper-Collins Publishers, 2008). She trained Alex, an African Gray parrot, to say several phrases. That is not surprising: African Gray parrots are known for their nimble wits. What is surprising is that Alex seems to have pushed beyond simply memorizing a lot of words and phrases. Once, for example, when Dr. Pepperberg had become upset about something, Alex, out of nowhere, said to her: “Calm down.” Did Alex sense her unhappiness?

Dr. Pepperberg wisely refuses to call Alex’s vocalizations ‘language.’ “I avoid the language issue,” she said. “I’m not making claims. His behavior gets more and more advanced, but I don’t believe that years from now, you could interview him.” She continued: “What little syntax he has is very simplistic. Language is what you and I are doing, an incredibly complex form of communication.” This all sounds very sensible.

What do I think? I don’t think parrots possess language in our sense, but I do think that they, like dogs and cats, can perceive emotions in those closest to them and react to those emotions. That, I think, is as far as it goes.

Let us return to language. Of all those qualities we associate with ourselves—love, fear, curiosity, ability to walk upright, an opposable thumb, cranial capacity of some 1,300 cubic centimeters—none is as essentially and profoundly human as the possession of language, both spoken language and sign language. (One of the great ‘discoveries’ of modern linguistics is that sign languages are languages: they are not merely enciphered, spoken languages.) A human without language would be a beast—an agile, quick-witted, clever beast perhaps—but a beast nonetheless.

Language is so much with us, so much a part of our everyday life—and it is so easy to learn our own language as a child, in fact, that we don’t think of that process as ‘learning’—it’s so natural and unbidden—that it somehow seems perverse and simple-minded to want to study language the way, say, a biologist might study a grasshopper or a chemist a compound. Isn’t language too formless, too seamless—too big—to study this way?

And since language is the means by which an object, say a grasshopper’s eye, is described, does it make sense to use language to talk about language? Using language to talk about language? Isn’t there something viciously circular here, a paradox, a sort of linguistic version of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle in play? (Werner Heisenberg, the German Nobel-Prize theoretical physicist, wrote in 1927 of subatomic particles that ‘the more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known in this instant, and vice versa.’) In other words, the more closely you observe something, the blurrier it gets. One of the pioneers of modern American linguistics (W. Freeman Twaddell) put it this way: talking about language is like keeping a fire going in a wooden stove.

We do not know how old spoken language is (written language is different: it is only some 6,000–7,000 years old, a mere whisper in historical time). Estimates of between 20,000 and 250,000 years or even higher can be found for the age of spoken language (I think 20,000 is too low and 250,000 is maybe too high, but if I were forced to choose between the two, I would go with the higher figure, 250,000. To play it safe, I say, “Maybe 50,000 to 100,000 years old.”).

Almost everyone sometimes wonders about words, how we use them, where they came from, how to pronounce them correctly, how to spell them correctly. If writing is part of your job, you will have to look up words in the dictionary on occasion. (These days, you may do most of the word search by using your computer’s thesaurus, but, personally, I don’t like any of the software thesaurus programs I have used. Buy a copy of the O.E.D., the Oxford English Dictionary and place it by your bedside. You will find it interesting and often-amusing reading.)

The Bible has its tale of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:8–9) to account for the immense diversity in language evident to this day throughout the Middle East. (“Let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.”) The Hindu priest-grammarian, Panini, some two millennia ago, in ancient India, wrote so accurate, so exquisitely detailed a grammar of Sanskrit, the sacred language of Hindu scripture and tradition, that it is unmatched even today among grammars of languages for its completeness and subtlety: it endures as one of the great monuments to the accomplishments of the human mind, as wonderful in its domain as architectural monuments like the Taj Mahal or intellectual achievements like the works of Plato and Kant. Plato, in his dialogue Cratylos, has Socrates devise ingenious and gloriously wrongheaded etymologies for the names of the Homeric heroes and the Greek gods.

However, it is one thing to be curious about language, altogether another to ‘do’ linguistics. What then is linguistics? The definition in vogue for linguistics in its modern shape (‘Linguistics is the scientific study of language’) doesn’t really tell us very much.

Linguistics isn’t a high-school subject, normally, so you don’t have preconceptions about what it is as you reach college age. Most educated people have some commonsense notion, which may be and probably is outdated, of what historians, chemists, geographers, and teachers of literature do these days. But linguists?

Let us dispose of one matter. Linguists at universities do not generally spend their days learning one new language after another like a modern-day Richard Burton, the 19^th-century explorer (not the movie actor married twice to Elizabeth Taylor) who was one of the first to make a stab (a wrong stab as it happens, but a close stab nevertheless) at discovering the source of the Nile when that, along with the North and South Poles, was the great goal of exploration. Burton, it is said, knew 29 different languages and 11 dialects of Arabic. But the numbers 29 and 11 came from Burton himself, and since he played loose with the truth about almost everything else he did, I rather think that he exaggerated here. I doubt that he knew anywhere near 29 languages fluently enough to speak them like a native—five or six or up to a maximum of a dozen, yes, I’ll grant him that; but 29? Not likely.

The only language besides English I know well is German, having studied in Stuttgart my senior year of college and given up English for a year while I was doing it. Total immersion, zero tolerance of English. Which is the best way. You want to learn another language? Fine; but quit speaking English while you’re doing it. True, I was somewhat obsessive about it and, as I ruefully recall, very rude about it with Germans who wanted to practice their English on me. But it worked: I learned German very well. My Yiddish, a language closely related to German but not always mutually intelligible with it, is not bad (Yiddish is one of my major research areas), but, fluent, I am not.

My French is adequate to my needs and usually satisfactory—the French can be very judgmental about foreigners trying to speak their language. People in general aren’t rational about language; the French are the same, only more so.

I know one other foreign language. I did fieldwork in 1963 as a graduate student on a tribal (‘tribal’ in India means ‘indigenous’) language of India called Remo (which is the word its speakers use for ‘human being’) or Bondo (which other people have called them), spoken in the Indian state of Orissa (now written Odisha by preference). When I was there, I got passably fluent in Remo. Since nobody outside of that remote hill area of India where it is native speaks it, I never had the opportunity to keep up my facility in Remo (it has never been a written language). There are estimated to be about 5,000 speakers of Remo, down from the 7,000 estimated in 1963.

Even if normal people use ‘linguist’ to mean someone who speaks several languages or is good at learning other languages, linguists use a different word, an ugly and unkind word: ‘polyglot.’ (‘Poly’ means ‘many’ in Greek, ‘glot’ is derived from the Greek word glossa—tongue; the tongue; by extension, a language. Rhetoricians call this a ‘synecdoche:’ a figure of speech in which a term for a part of something refers to the whole of something or vice versa).

Linguists do, as a matter of course, usually know at least one other language in addition to their own and often more, but analysis and understanding of the way language works are the goals of present-day academic linguistics, not learning other languages.

The most basic activity of linguistics is a cataloguing and descriptive one. At least 3,000 languages are spoken in the world today, and the number could easily be put at twice that. The differences in the two estimates are not as significant as it might appear. It’s partly that we don’t know for sure: there are many hundreds of languages spoken in jungly areas like the Amazon River basin and New Guinea, and we haven’t recorded all of them. It is also partly a matter of how you count ‘language’ as opposed to ‘dialect.’ Standard Swedish and Standard Norwegian are about as different from each other as educated American English and British English are, in other words, not all that different, and mutual intelligibility is not usually a problem. Yet, we normally count Swedish and Norwegian as different languages and both variants of English as a single language.

It is a political and not a sober linguistic judgment whether to call something a ‘language’ rather than a ‘dialect.’ Educated Ame...